“Being brought up in Brooklyn is not the most auspicious beginning for a renaissance man, even defined narrowly,” quipped Maggie Poole. She twisted in her seat toward Martin. “I’m not ruffling your feathers, am I?”
Martin only smiled.
“Yes, well,” the chairman continued, “our man majored in commerce and minored in Russian at a Long Island state college but never seems to have earned a degree. During vacations he climbed the lower alps in the more modest American mountain ranges. At loose ends, he joined the army to see the world and wound up, God knows why, toiling for military intelligence, where he focused on anticommunist dissidents in the satellite states of Eastern Europe. Do I have that right, Martin? Ah, here’s something positively intriguing. When he was younger he worked in the private sector with explosives—”
Maggie Poole turned to Martin. “What précisément did you do with explosives?”
Martin rocked his chair off the wall onto its four legs. “It was a summer job, really. I worked for a construction company demolishing old buildings that were going to be replaced, then blasting through bedrock to make way for the subbasement garages. I was the guy who shouted through a bullhorn for everyone to clear the area.”
“But do you know anything about dynamite?”
“I picked up a bit here and a bit there hanging around the dynamiters. I bought some books and studied the subject. By the end of the summer I had my own blasting license.”
“Did you fabricate dynamite or just light the fuses?”
“Either, or. When I first came to work for the Company,” Martin said, “I spent a month or two making letter bombs, then I got promoted to rigging portable phones so that we could detonate them from a distance. I also worked with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, which you know as PETN, an explosive of choice for terrorists. You can mix it with latex to give it plasticity and mold it to fit into anything—a telephone, a radio, a teddy bear, a cigar. You get a big bang out of relatively small amounts of PETN, and in the absence of a detonator, it’s extremely stable. PETN isn’t readily available on the open market but anyone with a blasting license, which Martin Odum has, can obtain the ingredients for roughly twenty dollars the pound. The explosive, incidentally, can pass through any airport X-ray machine in operation today.”
“Well, that opens up some intriguing possibilities,” the chairman informed the others.
“He could have done a stint as an explosive specialist at a shale quarry in Colorado, then been fired for something or other—”
“Stealing PETN and selling it on the open market—”
“Sleeping with the boss’s wife—”
“Homosexualité, even.”
Martin piped up from the wall. “If you don’t mind, I draw the line at having homosexuality in my legend.”
“We’ll figure out why he was fired later. What we have here is an Irish Catholic—”
“Lapsed. Don’t forget he’s lapsed.”
“—a lapsed Irish Catholic who worked with explosives in the private sector.”
“Only to be fired for an as yet undetermined offense.”
“At which point he became a free-lance explosive expert.”
“We may have a problem here,” said the chairman, tapping a fore-finger on one page of Martin Odum’s 201 folder. “Our Martin Odum is circumcised. Dante Pippen, lapsed or not, is an Irish Catholic. How do we explain the fact that he’s circumcised.”
The committee kicked around several possibilities. It was Maggie Poole who invented a suitable fiction. “In the unlikely event the question should come up, he could say he was talked into it by his first American girlfriend, who thought she would have less chance of catching a venereal disease from him if he were circumcised. Pippen could say the operation was performed in a New York clinic. It shouldn’t be too difficult to plant a medical record at a clinic to backstop the story.”
“Moving on, could he have been a member, at one point, of the IRA?”
“An IRA dynamiter! Now that’s creative. It’s not something the Russians or East Europeans could verify because the IRA is more secretive than the KGB.”
“We could give him an arrest record in England. Arrested, questioned about an IRA bombing or two, released for lack of evidence.”
“We could even plant small items in the press about the arrests.”
“We are mining a rich vein,” declared the chairman, his eyes bulging with enthusiasm. “What do you think, Martin?”
“I like it,” Martin said from his seat. “Crystal Quest will like it, too. Dante Pippen is exactly the kind of legend that will open doors.”
1989: DANTE PIPPEN SEES THE MILKY WAY IN A NEW LIGHT
WHEN THE BATTERED FORD REACHED THE FERTILE RIFT KNOWN as the Bekaa Valley, the Palestinians knotted a blindfold over Dante’s eyes. Twenty minutes later the two-car motorcade passed through a gate in a perimeter fence and pulled to a stop at the edge of an abandoned quarry. The Palestinians tugged Dante from the back seat and guided him through the narrow dirt streets to the mosque on the edge of a Lebanese village. In the antechamber, his shoes and the blindfold were removed and he was led to a threadbare prayer carpet near the altar and motioned to sit. Ten minutes later the imam slipped in through a latticed side door. A corpulent man who moved, as heavy men often do, with surprising suppleness, he settled onto the carpet facing Dante. Arranging the folds of his flowing white robe like a Noh actor preoccupied with his image, he produced a string of jade worry beads and began working them through the stubby fingers of his left hand. In his early forties, with a crew cut and a neatly trimmed beard, the imam rocked back and forth in prayer for several moments. Finally he raised his eyes and, speaking English with a crisp British accent, announced, “I am Dr. Izzat al-Karim.”
“I suspect you know who I am,” Dante replied.
The corners of the imam’s mouth curled into a pudgy grin. “Indeed I do. You are the IRA dynamiter we have heard so much about. I may say that your reputation precedes you—”
Dante dismissed the compliment with a wave of his hand. “So does your shadow when the sun is behind you.”
The imam’s jowls quivered in silent laughter. He held out a pack of Iranian Bahman cigarettes, offering one to his visitor.
“I have stopped smoking,” Dante informed his host.
“Ah, if only I could follow your example,” the imam said with a sigh. He tapped one of the thin cigarettes against the metal tray on a low table to tamp down the tobacco and slipped it between his lips. Using a Zippo lighter with a picture of Muhammad Ali on it, he lit the cigarette and slowly exhaled. “I envy you your strength of character. What was the secret that enabled you to give up cigarettes?”
“I convinced myself to become a different person, so to speak,” Dante explained. “One day I was smoking two tins of Ganaesh Beedies a day. When I woke up the next morning I was someone else. And this someone else was a nonsmoker.”
The imam let this sink in. “I wear the black turban of the sayyid, which marks me as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and his cousin Ali. I have two wives and I am about to take a third. Many people—my wives, my children, my fighters—count on me. It would be awkward for everyone if I were to become someone else.”
“If I had as many wives as you,” Dante remarked, “I’d probably start smoking again.”